TY - CONF AB - A controller is a device that interacts with a plant. At each time point,it reads the plant’s state and issues commands with the goal that the plant oper-ates optimally. Constructing optimal controllers is a fundamental and challengingproblem. Machine learning techniques have recently been successfully applied totrain controllers, yet they have limitations. Learned controllers are monolithic andhard to reason about. In particular, it is difficult to add features without retraining,to guarantee any level of performance, and to achieve acceptable performancewhen encountering untrained scenarios. These limitations can be addressed bydeploying quantitative run-timeshieldsthat serve as a proxy for the controller.At each time point, the shield reads the command issued by the controller andmay choose to alter it before passing it on to the plant. We show how optimalshields that interfere as little as possible while guaranteeing a desired level ofcontroller performance, can be generated systematically and automatically usingreactive synthesis. First, we abstract the plant by building a stochastic model.Second, we consider the learned controller to be a black box. Third, we mea-surecontroller performanceandshield interferenceby two quantitative run-timemeasures that are formally defined using weighted automata. Then, the problemof constructing a shield that guarantees maximal performance with minimal inter-ference is the problem of finding an optimal strategy in a stochastic2-player game“controller versus shield” played on the abstract state space of the plant with aquantitative objective obtained from combining the performance and interferencemeasures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by automatically con-structing lightweight shields for learned traffic-light controllers in various roadnetworks. The shields we generate avoid liveness bugs, improve controller per-formance in untrained and changing traffic situations, and add features to learnedcontrollers, such as giving priority to emergency vehicles. AU - Avni, Guy AU - Bloem, Roderick AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Henzinger, Thomas A AU - Konighofer, Bettina AU - Pranger, Stefan ID - 6462 SN - 0302-9743 T2 - 31st International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification TI - Run-time optimization for learned controllers through quantitative games VL - 11561 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Direct reciprocity is a powerful mechanism for the evolution of cooperation on the basis of repeated interactions1,2,3,4. It requires that interacting individuals are sufficiently equal, such that everyone faces similar consequences when they cooperate or defect. Yet inequality is ubiquitous among humans5,6 and is generally considered to undermine cooperation and welfare7,8,9,10. Most previous models of reciprocity do not include inequality11,12,13,14,15. These models assume that individuals are the same in all relevant aspects. Here we introduce a general framework to study direct reciprocity among unequal individuals. Our model allows for multiple sources of inequality. Subjects can differ in their endowments, their productivities and in how much they benefit from public goods. We find that extreme inequality prevents cooperation. But if subjects differ in productivity, some endowment inequality can be necessary for cooperation to prevail. Our mathematical predictions are supported by a behavioural experiment in which we vary the endowments and productivities of the subjects. We observe that overall welfare is maximized when the two sources of heterogeneity are aligned, such that more productive individuals receive higher endowments. By contrast, when endowments and productivities are misaligned, cooperation quickly breaks down. Our findings have implications for policy-makers concerned with equity, efficiency and the provisioning of public goods. AU - Hauser, Oliver P. AU - Hilbe, Christian AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Nowak, Martin A. ID - 6836 IS - 7770 JF - Nature SN - 00280836 TI - Social dilemmas among unequals VL - 572 ER - TY - CONF AB - Graph games and Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models in reactive synthesis and verification of probabilistic systems with nondeterminism. The class of 𝜔 -regular winning conditions; e.g., safety, reachability, liveness, parity conditions; provides a robust and expressive specification formalism for properties that arise in analysis of reactive systems. The resolutions of nondeterminism in games and MDPs are represented as strategies, and we consider succinct representation of such strategies. The decision-tree data structure from machine learning retains the flavor of decisions of strategies and allows entropy-based minimization to obtain succinct trees. However, in contrast to traditional machine-learning problems where small errors are allowed, for winning strategies in graph games and MDPs no error is allowed, and the decision tree must represent the entire strategy. In this work we propose decision trees with linear classifiers for representation of strategies in graph games and MDPs. We have implemented strategy representation using this data structure and we present experimental results for problems on graph games and MDPs, which show that this new data structure presents a much more efficient strategy representation as compared to standard decision trees. AU - Ashok, Pranav AU - Brázdil, Tomáš AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Křetínský, Jan AU - Lampert, Christoph AU - Toman, Viktor ID - 6942 SN - 0302-9743 T2 - 16th International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of Systems TI - Strategy representation by decision trees with linear classifiers VL - 11785 ER - TY - CONF AB - A probabilistic vector addition system with states (pVASS) is a finite state Markov process augmented with non-negative integer counters that can be incremented or decremented during each state transition, blocking any behaviour that would cause a counter to decrease below zero. The pVASS can be used as abstractions of probabilistic programs with many decidable properties. The use of pVASS as abstractions requires the presence of nondeterminism in the model. In this paper, we develop techniques for checking fast termination of pVASS with nondeterminism. That is, for every initial configuration of size n, we consider the worst expected number of transitions needed to reach a configuration with some counter negative (the expected termination time). We show that the problem whether the asymptotic expected termination time is linear is decidable in polynomial time for a certain natural class of pVASS with nondeterminism. Furthermore, we show the following dichotomy: if the asymptotic expected termination time is not linear, then it is at least quadratic, i.e., in Ω(n2). AU - Brázdil, Tomás AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Kucera, Antonín AU - Novotný, Petr AU - Velan, Dominik ID - 7183 SN - 03029743 T2 - International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis TI - Deciding fast termination for probabilistic VASS with nondeterminism VL - 11781 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The rate of biological evolution depends on the fixation probability and on the fixation time of new mutants. Intensive research has focused on identifying population structures that augment the fixation probability of advantageous mutants. But these amplifiers of natural selection typically increase fixation time. Here we study population structures that achieve a tradeoff between fixation probability and time. First, we show that no amplifiers can have an asymptotically lower absorption time than the well-mixed population. Then we design population structures that substantially augment the fixation probability with just a minor increase in fixation time. Finally, we show that those structures enable higher effective rate of evolution than the well-mixed population provided that the rate of generating advantageous mutants is relatively low. Our work sheds light on how population structure affects the rate of evolution. Moreover, our structures could be useful for lab-based, medical, or industrial applications of evolutionary optimization. AU - Tkadlec, Josef AU - Pavlogiannis, Andreas AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Nowak, Martin A. ID - 7210 JF - Communications Biology SN - 2399-3642 TI - Population structure determines the tradeoff between fixation probability and fixation time VL - 2 ER - TY - CONF AB - The verification of concurrent programs remains an open challenge, as thread interaction has to be accounted for, which leads to state-space explosion. Stateless model checking battles this problem by exploring traces rather than states of the program. As there are exponentially many traces, dynamic partial-order reduction (DPOR) techniques are used to partition the trace space into equivalence classes, and explore a few representatives from each class. The standard equivalence that underlies most DPOR techniques is the happens-before equivalence, however recent works have spawned a vivid interest towards coarser equivalences. The efficiency of such approaches is a product of two parameters: (i) the size of the partitioning induced by the equivalence, and (ii) the time spent by the exploration algorithm in each class of the partitioning. In this work, we present a new equivalence, called value-happens-before and show that it has two appealing features. First, value-happens-before is always at least as coarse as the happens-before equivalence, and can be even exponentially coarser. Second, the value-happens-before partitioning is efficiently explorable when the number of threads is bounded. We present an algorithm called value-centric DPOR (VCDPOR), which explores the underlying partitioning using polynomial time per class. Finally, we perform an experimental evaluation of VCDPOR on various benchmarks, and compare it against other state-of-the-art approaches. Our results show that value-happens-before typically induces a significant reduction in the size of the underlying partitioning, which leads to a considerable reduction in the running time for exploring the whole partitioning. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Pavlogiannis, Andreas AU - Toman, Viktor ID - 10190 KW - safety KW - risk KW - reliability and quality KW - software T2 - Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications TI - Value-centric dynamic partial order reduction VL - 3 ER - TY - CONF AB - Graph planning gives rise to fundamental algorithmic questions such as shortest path, traveling salesman problem, etc. A classical problem in discrete planning is to consider a weighted graph and construct a path that maximizes the sum of weights for a given time horizon T. However, in many scenarios, the time horizon is not fixed, but the stopping time is chosen according to some distribution such that the expected stopping time is T. If the stopping time distribution is not known, then to ensure robustness, the distribution is chosen by an adversary, to represent the worst-case scenario. A stationary plan for every vertex always chooses the same outgoing edge. For fixed horizon or fixed stopping-time distribution, stationary plans are not sufficient for optimality. Quite surprisingly we show that when an adversary chooses the stopping-time distribution with expected stopping time T, then stationary plans are sufficient. While computing optimal stationary plans for fixed horizon is NP-complete, we show that computing optimal stationary plans under adversarial stopping-time distribution can be achieved in polynomial time. Consequently, our polynomial-time algorithm for adversarial stopping time also computes an optimal plan among all possible plans. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Doyen, Laurent ID - 7402 SN - 9781728136080 T2 - 34th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science TI - Graph planning with expected finite horizon ER - TY - GEN AB - The input to the token swapping problem is a graph with vertices v1, v2, . . . , vn, and n tokens with labels 1,2, . . . , n, one on each vertex. The goal is to get token i to vertex vi for all i= 1, . . . , n using a minimum number of swaps, where a swap exchanges the tokens on the endpoints of an edge.Token swapping on a tree, also known as “sorting with a transposition tree,” is not known to be in P nor NP-complete. We present some partial results: 1. An optimum swap sequence may need to perform a swap on a leaf vertex that has the correct token (a “happy leaf”), disproving a conjecture of Vaughan. 2. Any algorithm that fixes happy leaves—as all known approximation algorithms for the problem do—has approximation factor at least 4/3. Furthermore, the two best-known 2-approximation algorithms have approximation factor exactly 2. 3. A generalized problem—weighted coloured token swapping—is NP-complete on trees, but solvable in polynomial time on paths and stars. In this version, tokens and vertices have colours, and colours have weights. The goal is to get every token to a vertex of the same colour, and the cost of a swap is the sum of the weights of the two tokens involved. AU - Biniaz, Ahmad AU - Jain, Kshitij AU - Lubiw, Anna AU - Masárová, Zuzana AU - Miltzow, Tillmann AU - Mondal, Debajyoti AU - Naredla, Anurag Murty AU - Tkadlec, Josef AU - Turcotte, Alexi ID - 7950 T2 - arXiv TI - Token swapping on trees ER - TY - CONF AB - In this work, we consider the almost-sure termination problem for probabilistic programs that asks whether a given probabilistic program terminates with probability 1. Scalable approaches for program analysis often rely on modularity as their theoretical basis. In non-probabilistic programs, the classical variant rule (V-rule) of Floyd-Hoare logic provides the foundation for modular analysis. Extension of this rule to almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs is quite tricky, and a probabilistic variant was proposed in [16]. While the proposed probabilistic variant cautiously addresses the key issue of integrability, we show that the proposed modular rule is still not sound for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs. Besides establishing unsoundness of the previous rule, our contributions are as follows: First, we present a sound modular rule for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs. Our approach is based on a novel notion of descent supermartingales. Second, for algorithmic approaches, we consider descent supermartingales that are linear and show that they can be synthesized in polynomial time. Finally, we present experimental results on a variety of benchmarks and several natural examples that model various types of nested while loops in probabilistic programs and demonstrate that our approach is able to efficiently prove their almost-sure termination property AU - Huang, Mingzhang AU - Fu, Hongfei AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar ID - 6780 T2 - Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications TI - Modular verification for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs VL - 3 ER - TY - JOUR AB - There is a huge gap between the speeds of modern caches and main memories, and therefore cache misses account for a considerable loss of efficiency in programs. The predominant technique to address this issue has been Data Packing: data elements that are frequently accessed within time proximity are packed into the same cache block, thereby minimizing accesses to the main memory. We consider the algorithmic problem of Data Packing on a two-level memory system. Given a reference sequence R of accesses to data elements, the task is to partition the elements into cache blocks such that the number of cache misses on R is minimized. The problem is notoriously difficult: it is NP-hard even when the cache has size 1, and is hard to approximate for any cache size larger than 4. Therefore, all existing techniques for Data Packing are based on heuristics and lack theoretical guarantees. In this work, we present the first positive theoretical results for Data Packing, along with new and stronger negative results. We consider the problem under the lens of the underlying access hypergraphs, which are hypergraphs of affinities between the data elements, where the order of an access hypergraph corresponds to the size of the affinity group. We study the problem parameterized by the treewidth of access hypergraphs, which is a standard notion in graph theory to measure the closeness of a graph to a tree. Our main results are as follows: We show there is a number q* depending on the cache parameters such that (a) if the access hypergraph of order q* has constant treewidth, then there is a linear-time algorithm for Data Packing; (b)the Data Packing problem remains NP-hard even if the access hypergraph of order q*-1 has constant treewidth. Thus, we establish a fine-grained dichotomy depending on a single parameter, namely, the highest order among access hypegraphs that have constant treewidth; and establish the optimal value q* of this parameter. Finally, we present an experimental evaluation of a prototype implementation of our algorithm. Our results demonstrate that, in practice, access hypergraphs of many commonly-used algorithms have small treewidth. We compare our approach with several state-of-the-art heuristic-based algorithms and show that our algorithm leads to significantly fewer cache-misses. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar AU - Okati, Nastaran AU - Pavlogiannis, Andreas ID - 6380 IS - POPL JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages SN - 2475-1421 TI - Efficient parameterized algorithms for data packing VL - 3 ER - TY - CONF AB - In today's programmable blockchains, smart contracts are limited to being deterministic and non-probabilistic. This lack of randomness is a consequential limitation, given that a wide variety of real-world financial contracts, such as casino games and lotteries, depend entirely on randomness. As a result, several ad-hoc random number generation approaches have been developed to be used in smart contracts. These include ideas such as using an oracle or relying on the block hash. However, these approaches are manipulatable, i.e. their output can be tampered with by parties who might not be neutral, such as the owner of the oracle or the miners.We propose a novel game-theoretic approach for generating provably unmanipulatable pseudorandom numbers on the blockchain. Our approach allows smart contracts to access a trustworthy source of randomness that does not rely on potentially compromised miners or oracles, hence enabling the creation of a new generation of smart contracts that are not limited to being non-probabilistic and can be drawn from the much more general class of probabilistic programs. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar AU - Pourdamghani, Arash ID - 6056 T2 - IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency TI - Probabilistic smart contracts: Secure randomness on the blockchain ER - TY - CONF AB - In today's cryptocurrencies, Hashcash proof of work is the most commonly-adopted approach to mining. In Hashcash, when a miner decides to add a block to the chain, she has to solve the difficult computational puzzle of inverting a hash function. While Hashcash has been successfully adopted in both Bitcoin and Ethereum, it has attracted significant and harsh criticism due to its massive waste of electricity, its carbon footprint and environmental effects, and the inherent lack of usefulness in inverting a hash function. Various other mining protocols have been suggested, including proof of stake, in which a miner's chance of adding the next block is proportional to her current balance. However, such protocols lead to a higher entry cost for new miners who might not still have any stake in the cryptocurrency, and can in the worst case lead to an oligopoly, where the rich have complete control over mining. In this paper, we propose Hybrid Mining: a new mining protocol that combines solving real-world useful problems with Hashcash. Our protocol allows new miners to join the network by taking part in Hashcash mining without having to own an initial stake. It also allows nodes of the network to submit hard computational problems whose solutions are of interest in the real world, e.g.~protein folding problems. Then, miners can choose to compete in solving these problems, in lieu of Hashcash, for adding a new block. Hence, Hybrid Mining incentivizes miners to solve useful problems, such as hard computational problems arising in biology, in a distributed manner. It also gives researchers in other areas an easy-to-use tool to outsource their hard computations to the blockchain network, which has enormous computational power, by paying a reward to the miner who solves the problem for them. Moreover, our protocol provides strong security guarantees and is at least as resilient to double spending as Bitcoin. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar AU - Pourdamghani, Arash ID - 6378 SN - 9781450359337 T2 - Proceedings of the 34th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing TI - Hybrid Mining: Exploiting blockchain’s computational power for distributed problem solving VL - Part F147772 ER - TY - CONF AB - We consider the problem of expected cost analysis over nondeterministic probabilistic programs, which aims at automated methods for analyzing the resource-usage of such programs. Previous approaches for this problem could only handle nonnegative bounded costs. However, in many scenarios, such as queuing networks or analysis of cryptocurrency protocols, both positive and negative costs are necessary and the costs are unbounded as well. In this work, we present a sound and efficient approach to obtain polynomial bounds on the expected accumulated cost of nondeterministic probabilistic programs. Our approach can handle (a) general positive and negative costs with bounded updates in variables; and (b) nonnegative costs with general updates to variables. We show that several natural examples which could not be handled by previous approaches are captured in our framework. Moreover, our approach leads to an efficient polynomial-time algorithm, while no previous approach for cost analysis of probabilistic programs could guarantee polynomial runtime. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our approach using experimental results on a variety of programs for which we efficiently synthesize tight resource-usage bounds. AU - Wang, Peixin AU - Fu, Hongfei AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Qin, Xudong AU - Shi, Wenjun ID - 6175 KW - Program Cost Analysis KW - Program Termination KW - Probabilistic Programs KW - Martingales T2 - PLDI 2019: Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation TI - Cost analysis of nondeterministic probabilistic programs ER - TY - CONF AB - Smart contracts are programs that are stored and executed on the Blockchain and can receive, manage and transfer money (cryptocurrency units). Two important problems regarding smart contracts are formal analysis and compiler optimization. Formal analysis is extremely important, because smart contracts hold funds worth billions of dollars and their code is immutable after deployment. Hence, an undetected bug can cause significant financial losses. Compiler optimization is also crucial, because every action of a smart contract has to be executed by every node in the Blockchain network. Therefore, optimizations in compiling smart contracts can lead to significant savings in computation, time and energy. Two classical approaches in program analysis and compiler optimization are intraprocedural and interprocedural analysis. In intraprocedural analysis, each function is analyzed separately, while interprocedural analysis considers the entire program. In both cases, the analyses are usually reduced to graph problems over the control flow graph (CFG) of the program. These graph problems are often computationally expensive. Hence, there has been ample research on exploiting structural properties of CFGs for efficient algorithms. One such well-studied property is the treewidth, which is a measure of tree-likeness of graphs. It is known that intraprocedural CFGs of structured programs have treewidth at most 6, whereas the interprocedural treewidth cannot be bounded. This result has been used as a basis for many efficient intraprocedural analyses. In this paper, we explore the idea of exploiting the treewidth of smart contracts for formal analysis and compiler optimization. First, similar to classical programs, we show that the intraprocedural treewidth of structured Solidity and Vyper smart contracts is at most 9. Second, for global analysis, we prove that the interprocedural treewidth of structured smart contracts is bounded by 10 and, in sharp contrast with classical programs, treewidth-based algorithms can be easily applied for interprocedural analysis. Finally, we supplement our theoretical results with experiments using a tool we implemented for computing treewidth of smart contracts and show that the treewidth is much lower in practice. We use 36,764 real-world Ethereum smart contracts as benchmarks and find that they have an average treewidth of at most 3.35 for the intraprocedural case and 3.65 for the interprocedural case. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar AU - Goharshady, Ehsan Kafshdar ID - 6490 SN - 9781450359337 T2 - Proceedings of the 34th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing TI - The treewidth of smart contracts VL - Part F147772 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Interprocedural analysis is at the heart of numerous applications in programming languages, such as alias analysis, constant propagation, and so on. Recursive state machines (RSMs) are standard models for interprocedural analysis. We consider a general framework with RSMs where the transitions are labeled from a semiring and path properties are algebraic with semiring operations. RSMs with algebraic path properties can model interprocedural dataflow analysis problems, the shortest path problem, the most probable path problem, and so on. The traditional algorithms for interprocedural analysis focus on path properties where the starting point is fixed as the entry point of a specific method. In this work, we consider possible multiple queries as required in many applications such as in alias analysis. The study of multiple queries allows us to bring in an important algorithmic distinction between the resource usage of the one-time preprocessing vs for each individual query. The second aspect we consider is that the control flow graphs for most programs have constant treewidth. Our main contributions are simple and implementable algorithms that support multiple queries for algebraic path properties for RSMs that have constant treewidth. Our theoretical results show that our algorithms have small additional one-time preprocessing but can answer subsequent queries significantly faster as compared to the current algorithmic solutions for interprocedural dataflow analysis. We have also implemented our algorithms and evaluated their performance for performing on-demand interprocedural dataflow analysis on various domains, such as for live variable analysis and reaching definitions, on a standard benchmark set. Our experimental results align with our theoretical statements and show that after a lightweight preprocessing, on-demand queries are answered much faster than the standard existing algorithmic approaches. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar AU - Goyal, Prateesh AU - Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus AU - Pavlogiannis, Andreas ID - 7158 IS - 4 JF - ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems SN - 0164-0925 TI - Faster algorithms for dynamic algebraic queries in basic RSMs with constant treewidth VL - 41 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We study the problem of developing efficient approaches for proving worst-case bounds of non-deterministic recursive programs. Ranking functions are sound and complete for proving termination and worst-case bounds of nonrecursive programs. First, we apply ranking functions to recursion, resulting in measure functions. We show that measure functions provide a sound and complete approach to prove worst-case bounds of non-deterministic recursive programs. Our second contribution is the synthesis of measure functions in nonpolynomial forms. We show that non-polynomial measure functions with logarithm and exponentiation can be synthesized through abstraction of logarithmic or exponentiation terms, Farkas' Lemma, and Handelman's Theorem using linear programming. While previous methods obtain worst-case polynomial bounds, our approach can synthesize bounds of the form $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$ as well as $\mathcal{O}(n^r)$ where $r$ is not an integer. We present experimental results to demonstrate that our approach can obtain efficiently worst-case bounds of classical recursive algorithms such as (i) Merge-Sort, the divide-and-conquer algorithm for the Closest-Pair problem, where we obtain $\mathcal{O}(n \log n)$ worst-case bound, and (ii) Karatsuba's algorithm for polynomial multiplication and Strassen's algorithm for matrix multiplication, where we obtain $\mathcal{O}(n^r)$ bound such that $r$ is not an integer and close to the best-known bounds for the respective algorithms. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Fu, Hongfei AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar ID - 7014 IS - 4 JF - ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems TI - Non-polynomial worst-case analysis of recursive programs VL - 41 ER - TY - CONF AB - Solving parity games, which are equivalent to modal μ-calculus model checking, is a central algorithmic problem in formal methods, with applications in reactive synthesis, program repair, verification of branching-time properties, etc. Besides the standard compu- tation model with the explicit representation of games, another important theoretical model of computation is that of set-based symbolic algorithms. Set-based symbolic algorithms use basic set operations and one-step predecessor operations on the implicit description of games, rather than the explicit representation. The significance of symbolic algorithms is that they provide scalable algorithms for large finite-state systems, as well as for infinite-state systems with finite quotient. Consider parity games on graphs with n vertices and parity conditions with d priorities. While there is a rich literature of explicit algorithms for parity games, the main results for set-based symbolic algorithms are as follows: (a) the basic algorithm that requires O(nd) symbolic operations and O(d) symbolic space; and (b) an improved algorithm that requires O(nd/3+1) symbolic operations and O(n) symbolic space. In this work, our contributions are as follows: (1) We present a black-box set-based symbolic algorithm based on the explicit progress measure algorithm. Two important consequences of our algorithm are as follows: (a) a set-based symbolic algorithm for parity games that requires quasi-polynomially many symbolic operations and O(n) symbolic space; and (b) any future improvement in progress measure based explicit algorithms immediately imply an efficiency improvement in our set-based symbolic algorithm for parity games. (2) We present a set-based symbolic algorithm that requires quasi-polynomially many symbolic operations and O(d · log n) symbolic space. Moreover, for the important special case of d ≤ log n, our algorithm requires only polynomially many symbolic operations and poly-logarithmic symbolic space. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Dvořák, Wolfgang AU - Henzinger, Monika H AU - Svozil, Alexander ID - 10883 SN - 2398-7340 T2 - 22nd International Conference on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning TI - Quasipolynomial set-based symbolic algorithms for parity games VL - 57 ER - TY - CONF AB - Probabilistic programs extend classical imperative programs with real-valued random variables and random branching. The most basic liveness property for such programs is the termination property. The qualitative (aka almost-sure) termination problem asks whether a given program program terminates with probability 1. While ranking functions provide a sound and complete method for non-probabilistic programs, the extension of them to probabilistic programs is achieved via ranking supermartingales (RSMs). Although deep theoretical results have been established about RSMs, their application to probabilistic programs with nondeterminism has been limited only to programs of restricted control-flow structure. For non-probabilistic programs, lexicographic ranking functions provide a compositional and practical approach for termination analysis of real-world programs. In this work we introduce lexicographic RSMs and show that they present a sound method for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs with nondeterminism. We show that lexicographic RSMs provide a tool for compositional reasoning about almost-sure termination, and for probabilistic programs with linear arithmetic they can be synthesized efficiently (in polynomial time). We also show that with additional restrictions even asymptotic bounds on expected termination time can be obtained through lexicographic RSMs. Finally, we present experimental results on benchmarks adapted from previous work to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. AU - Agrawal, Sheshansh AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Novotny, Petr ID - 325 IS - POPL TI - Lexicographic ranking supermartingales: an efficient approach to termination of probabilistic programs VL - 2 ER - TY - CHAP AB - Graph-based games are an important tool in computer science. They have applications in synthesis, verification, refinement, and far beyond. We review graphbased games with objectives on infinite plays. We give definitions and algorithms to solve the games and to give a winning strategy. The objectives we consider are mostly Boolean, but we also look at quantitative graph-based games and their objectives. Synthesis aims to turn temporal logic specifications into correct reactive systems. We explain the reduction of synthesis to graph-based games (or equivalently tree automata) using synthesis of LTL specifications as an example. We treat the classical approach that uses determinization of parity automata and more modern approaches. AU - Bloem, Roderick AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Jobstmann, Barbara ED - Henzinger, Thomas A ED - Clarke, Edmund M. ED - Veith, Helmut ED - Bloem, Roderick ID - 59 SN - 978-3-319-10574-1 T2 - Handbook of Model Checking TI - Graph games and reactive synthesis ER - TY - CHAP AB - Responsiveness—the requirement that every request to a system be eventually handled—is one of the fundamental liveness properties of a reactive system. Average response time is a quantitative measure for the responsiveness requirement used commonly in performance evaluation. We show how average response time can be computed on state-transition graphs, on Markov chains, and on game graphs. In all three cases, we give polynomial-time algorithms. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Henzinger, Thomas A AU - Otop, Jan ED - Lohstroh, Marten ED - Derler, Patricia ED - Sirjani, Marjan ID - 86 T2 - Principles of Modeling TI - Computing average response time VL - 10760 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for cooperation among humans. Many of our daily interactions are repeated. We interact repeatedly with our family, friends, colleagues, members of the local and even global community. In the theory of repeated games, it is a tacit assumption that the various games that a person plays simultaneously have no effect on each other. Here we introduce a general framework that allows us to analyze “crosstalk” between a player’s concurrent games. In the presence of crosstalk, the action a person experiences in one game can alter the person’s decision in another. We find that crosstalk impedes the maintenance of cooperation and requires stronger levels of forgiveness. The magnitude of the effect depends on the population structure. In more densely connected social groups, crosstalk has a stronger effect. A harsh retaliator, such as Tit-for-Tat, is unable to counteract crosstalk. The crosstalk framework provides a unified interpretation of direct and upstream reciprocity in the context of repeated games. AU - Reiter, Johannes AU - Hilbe, Christian AU - Rand, David AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Nowak, Martin ID - 454 IS - 1 JF - Nature Communications TI - Crosstalk in concurrent repeated games impedes direct reciprocity and requires stronger levels of forgiveness VL - 9 ER - TY - CONF AB - Vector Addition Systems with States (VASS) provide a well-known and fundamental model for the analysis of concurrent processes, parameterized systems, and are also used as abstract models of programs in resource bound analysis. In this paper we study the problem of obtaining asymptotic bounds on the termination time of a given VASS. In particular, we focus on the practically important case of obtaining polynomial bounds on termination time. Our main contributions are as follows: First, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for deciding whether a given VASS has a linear asymptotic complexity. We also show that if the complexity of a VASS is not linear, it is at least quadratic. Second, we classify VASS according to quantitative properties of their cycles. We show that certain singularities in these properties are the key reason for non-polynomial asymptotic complexity of VASS. In absence of singularities, we show that the asymptotic complexity is always polynomial and of the form Θ(nk), for some integer k d, where d is the dimension of the VASS. We present a polynomial-time algorithm computing the optimal k. For general VASS, the same algorithm, which is based on a complete technique for the construction of ranking functions in VASS, produces a valid lower bound, i.e., a k such that the termination complexity is (nk). Our results are based on new insights into the geometry of VASS dynamics, which hold the potential for further applicability to VASS analysis. AU - Brázdil, Tomáš AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Kučera, Antonín AU - Novotny, Petr AU - Velan, Dominik AU - Zuleger, Florian ID - 143 SN - 978-1-4503-5583-4 TI - Efficient algorithms for asymptotic bounds on termination time in VASS VL - F138033 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Social dilemmas occur when incentives for individuals are misaligned with group interests 1-7 . According to the 'tragedy of the commons', these misalignments can lead to overexploitation and collapse of public resources. The resulting behaviours can be analysed with the tools of game theory 8 . The theory of direct reciprocity 9-15 suggests that repeated interactions can alleviate such dilemmas, but previous work has assumed that the public resource remains constant over time. Here we introduce the idea that the public resource is instead changeable and depends on the strategic choices of individuals. An intuitive scenario is that cooperation increases the public resource, whereas defection decreases it. Thus, cooperation allows the possibility of playing a more valuable game with higher payoffs, whereas defection leads to a less valuable game. We analyse this idea using the theory of stochastic games 16-19 and evolutionary game theory. We find that the dependence of the public resource on previous interactions can greatly enhance the propensity for cooperation. For these results, the interaction between reciprocity and payoff feedback is crucial: neither repeated interactions in a constant environment nor single interactions in a changing environment yield similar cooperation rates. Our framework shows which feedbacks between exploitation and environment - either naturally occurring or designed - help to overcome social dilemmas. AU - Hilbe, Christian AU - Šimsa, Štepán AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Nowak, Martin ID - 157 IS - 7713 JF - Nature TI - Evolution of cooperation in stochastic games VL - 559 ER - TY - CONF AB - A model of computation that is widely used in the formal analysis of reactive systems is symbolic algorithms. In this model the access to the input graph is restricted to consist of symbolic operations, which are expensive in comparison to the standard RAM operations. We give lower bounds on the number of symbolic operations for basic graph problems such as the computation of the strongly connected components and of the approximate diameter as well as for fundamental problems in model checking such as safety, liveness, and coliveness. Our lower bounds are linear in the number of vertices of the graph, even for constant-diameter graphs. For none of these problems lower bounds on the number of symbolic operations were known before. The lower bounds show an interesting separation of these problems from the reachability problem, which can be solved with O(D) symbolic operations, where D is the diameter of the graph. Additionally we present an approximation algorithm for the graph diameter which requires Õ(n/D) symbolic steps to achieve a (1 +ϵ)-approximation for any constant > 0. This compares to O(n/D) symbolic steps for the (naive) exact algorithm and O(D) symbolic steps for a 2-approximation. Finally we also give a refined analysis of the strongly connected components algorithms of [15], showing that it uses an optimal number of symbolic steps that is proportional to the sum of the diameters of the strongly connected components. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Dvorák, Wolfgang AU - Henzinger, Monika H AU - Loitzenbauer, Veronika ID - 310 TI - Lower bounds for symbolic computation on graphs: Strongly connected components, liveness, safety, and diameter ER - TY - CONF AB - We study the almost-sure termination problem for probabilistic programs. First, we show that supermartingales with lower bounds on conditional absolute difference provide a sound approach for the almost-sure termination problem. Moreover, using this approach we can obtain explicit optimal bounds on tail probabilities of non-termination within a given number of steps. Second, we present a new approach based on Central Limit Theorem for the almost-sure termination problem, and show that this approach can establish almost-sure termination of programs which none of the existing approaches can handle. Finally, we discuss algorithmic approaches for the two above methods that lead to automated analysis techniques for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs. AU - Huang, Mingzhang AU - Fu, Hongfei AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu ED - Ryu, Sukyoung ID - 5679 SN - 03029743 TI - New approaches for almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs VL - 11275 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Reciprocity is a major factor in human social life and accounts for a large part of cooperation in our communities. Direct reciprocity arises when repeated interactions occur between the same individuals. The framework of iterated games formalizes this phenomenon. Despite being introduced more than five decades ago, the concept keeps offering beautiful surprises. Recent theoretical research driven by new mathematical tools has proposed a remarkable dichotomy among the crucial strategies: successful individuals either act as partners or as rivals. Rivals strive for unilateral advantages by applying selfish or extortionate strategies. Partners aim to share the payoff for mutual cooperation, but are ready to fight back when being exploited. Which of these behaviours evolves depends on the environment. Whereas small population sizes and a limited number of rounds favour rivalry, partner strategies are selected when populations are large and relationships stable. Only partners allow for evolution of cooperation, while the rivals’ attempt to put themselves first leads to defection. Hilbe et al. synthesize recent theoretical work on zero-determinant and ‘rival’ versus ‘partner’ strategies in social dilemmas. They describe the environments under which these contrasting selfish or cooperative strategies emerge in evolution. AU - Hilbe, Christian AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Nowak, Martin ID - 419 JF - Nature Human Behaviour TI - Partners and rivals in direct reciprocity VL - 2 ER - TY - CONF AB - Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a popular class of models suitable for solving control decision problems in probabilistic reactive systems. We consider parametric MDPs (pMDPs) that include parameters in some of the transition probabilities to account for stochastic uncertainties of the environment such as noise or input disturbances. We study pMDPs with reachability objectives where the parameter values are unknown and impossible to measure directly during execution, but there is a probability distribution known over the parameter values. We study for the first time computing parameter-independent strategies that are expectation optimal, i.e., optimize the expected reachability probability under the probability distribution over the parameters. We present an encoding of our problem to partially observable MDPs (POMDPs), i.e., a reduction of our problem to computing optimal strategies in POMDPs. We evaluate our method experimentally on several benchmarks: a motivating (repeated) learner model; a series of benchmarks of varying configurations of a robot moving on a grid; and a consensus protocol. AU - Arming, Sebastian AU - Bartocci, Ezio AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Katoen, Joost P AU - Sokolova, Ana ID - 79 TI - Parameter-independent strategies for pMDPs via POMDPs VL - 11024 ER - TY - CONF AB - Graph games played by two players over finite-state graphs are central in many problems in computer science. In particular, graph games with ω -regular winning conditions, specified as parity objectives, which can express properties such as safety, liveness, fairness, are the basic framework for verification and synthesis of reactive systems. The decisions for a player at various states of the graph game are represented as strategies. While the algorithmic problem for solving graph games with parity objectives has been widely studied, the most prominent data-structure for strategy representation in graph games has been binary decision diagrams (BDDs). However, due to the bit-level representation, BDDs do not retain the inherent flavor of the decisions of strategies, and are notoriously hard to minimize to obtain succinct representation. In this work we propose decision trees for strategy representation in graph games. Decision trees retain the flavor of decisions of strategies and allow entropy-based minimization to obtain succinct trees. However, decision trees work in settings (e.g., probabilistic models) where errors are allowed, and overfitting of data is typically avoided. In contrast, for strategies in graph games no error is allowed, and the decision tree must represent the entire strategy. We develop new techniques to extend decision trees to overcome the above obstacles, while retaining the entropy-based techniques to obtain succinct trees. We have implemented our techniques to extend the existing decision tree solvers. We present experimental results for problems in reactive synthesis to show that decision trees provide a much more efficient data-structure for strategy representation as compared to BDDs. AU - Brázdil, Tomáš AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Kretinsky, Jan AU - Toman, Viktor ID - 297 TI - Strategy representation by decision trees in reactive synthesis VL - 10805 ER - TY - CONF AB - Given a model and a specification, the fundamental model-checking problem asks for algorithmic verification of whether the model satisfies the specification. We consider graphs and Markov decision processes (MDPs), which are fundamental models for reactive systems. One of the very basic specifications that arise in verification of reactive systems is the strong fairness (aka Streett) objective. Given different types of requests and corresponding grants, the objective requires that for each type, if the request event happens infinitely often, then the corresponding grant event must also happen infinitely often. All ω -regular objectives can be expressed as Streett objectives and hence they are canonical in verification. To handle the state-space explosion, symbolic algorithms are required that operate on a succinct implicit representation of the system rather than explicitly accessing the system. While explicit algorithms for graphs and MDPs with Streett objectives have been widely studied, there has been no improvement of the basic symbolic algorithms. The worst-case numbers of symbolic steps required for the basic symbolic algorithms are as follows: quadratic for graphs and cubic for MDPs. In this work we present the first sub-quadratic symbolic algorithm for graphs with Streett objectives, and our algorithm is sub-quadratic even for MDPs. Based on our algorithmic insights we present an implementation of the new symbolic approach and show that it improves the existing approach on several academic benchmark examples. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Henzinger, Monika H AU - Loitzenbauer, Veronika AU - Oraee, Simin AU - Toman, Viktor ID - 141 TI - Symbolic algorithms for graphs and Markov decision processes with fairness objectives VL - 10982 ER - TY - JOUR AB - People sometimes make their admirable deeds and accomplishments hard to spot, such as by giving anonymously or avoiding bragging. Such ‘buried’ signals are hard to reconcile with standard models of signalling or indirect reciprocity, which motivate costly pro-social behaviour by reputational gains. To explain these phenomena, we design a simple game theory model, which we call the signal-burying game. This game has the feature that senders can bury their signal by deliberately reducing the probability of the signal being observed. If the signal is observed, however, it is identified as having been buried. We show under which conditions buried signals can be maintained, using static equilibrium concepts and calculations of the evolutionary dynamics. We apply our analysis to shed light on a number of otherwise puzzling social phenomena, including modesty, anonymous donations, subtlety in art and fashion, and overeagerness. AU - Hoffman, Moshe AU - Hilbe, Christian AU - Nowak, Martin ID - 293 JF - Nature Human Behaviour TI - The signal-burying game can explain why we obscure positive traits and good deeds VL - 2 ER - TY - CONF AB - The Big Match is a multi-stage two-player game. In each stage Player 1 hides one or two pebbles in his hand, and his opponent has to guess that number; Player 1 loses a point if Player 2 is correct, and otherwise he wins a point. As soon as Player 1 hides one pebble, the players cannot change their choices in any future stage. Blackwell and Ferguson (1968) give an ε-optimal strategy for Player 1 that hides, in each stage, one pebble with a probability that depends on the entire past history. Any strategy that depends just on the clock or on a finite memory is worthless. The long-standing natural open problem has been whether every strategy that depends just on the clock and a finite memory is worthless. We prove that there is such a strategy that is ε-optimal. In fact, we show that just two states of memory are sufficient. AU - Hansen, Kristoffer Arnsfelt AU - Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus AU - Neyman, Abraham ID - 5967 SN - 9781450358293 T2 - Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation - EC '18 TI - The Big Match with a clock and a bit of memory ER - TY - JOUR AB - In this article, we consider the termination problem of probabilistic programs with real-valued variables. Thequestions concerned are: qualitative ones that ask (i) whether the program terminates with probability 1(almost-sure termination) and (ii) whether the expected termination time is finite (finite termination); andquantitative ones that ask (i) to approximate the expected termination time (expectation problem) and (ii) tocompute a boundBsuch that the probability not to terminate afterBsteps decreases exponentially (con-centration problem). To solve these questions, we utilize the notion of ranking supermartingales, which isa powerful approach for proving termination of probabilistic programs. In detail, we focus on algorithmicsynthesis of linear ranking-supermartingales over affine probabilistic programs (Apps) with both angelic anddemonic non-determinism. An important subclass of Apps is LRApp which is defined as the class of all Appsover which a linear ranking-supermartingale exists.Our main contributions are as follows. Firstly, we show that the membership problem of LRApp (i) canbe decided in polynomial time for Apps with at most demonic non-determinism, and (ii) isNP-hard and inPSPACEfor Apps with angelic non-determinism. Moreover, theNP-hardness result holds already for Appswithout probability and demonic non-determinism. Secondly, we show that the concentration problem overLRApp can be solved in the same complexity as for the membership problem of LRApp. Finally, we show thatthe expectation problem over LRApp can be solved in2EXPTIMEand isPSPACE-hard even for Apps withoutprobability and non-determinism (i.e., deterministic programs). Our experimental results demonstrate theeffectiveness of our approach to answer the qualitative and quantitative questions over Apps with at mostdemonic non-determinism. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Fu, Hongfei AU - Novotný, Petr AU - Hasheminezhad, Rouzbeh ID - 5993 IS - 2 JF - ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems SN - 0164-0925 TI - Algorithmic analysis of qualitative and quantitative termination problems for affine probabilistic programs VL - 40 ER - TY - CONF AB - Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are the standard models for planning under uncertainty with both finite and infinite horizon. Besides the well-known discounted-sum objective, indefinite-horizon objective (aka Goal-POMDPs) is another classical objective for POMDPs. In this case, given a set of target states and a positive cost for each transition, the optimization objective is to minimize the expected total cost until a target state is reached. In the literature, RTDP-Bel or heuristic search value iteration (HSVI) have been used for solving Goal-POMDPs. Neither of these algorithms has theoretical convergence guarantees, and HSVI may even fail to terminate its trials. We give the following contributions: (1) We discuss the challenges introduced in Goal-POMDPs and illustrate how they prevent the original HSVI from converging. (2) We present a novel algorithm inspired by HSVI, termed Goal-HSVI, and show that our algorithm has convergence guarantees. (3) We show that Goal-HSVI outperforms RTDP-Bel on a set of well-known examples. AU - Horák, Karel AU - Bošanský, Branislav AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu ID - 25 T2 - Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence TI - Goal-HSVI: Heuristic search value iteration for goal-POMDPs VL - 2018-July ER - TY - CONF AB - Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with discounted-sum payoff are a standard framework to model a wide range of problems related to decision making under uncertainty. Traditionally, the goal has been to obtain policies that optimize the expectation of the discounted-sum payoff. A key drawback of the expectation measure is that even low probability events with extreme payoff can significantly affect the expectation, and thus the obtained policies are not necessarily risk-averse. An alternate approach is to optimize the probability that the payoff is above a certain threshold, which allows obtaining risk-averse policies, but ignores optimization of the expectation. We consider the expectation optimization with probabilistic guarantee (EOPG) problem, where the goal is to optimize the expectation ensuring that the payoff is above a given threshold with at least a specified probability. We present several results on the EOPG problem, including the first algorithm to solve it. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Elgyütt, Adrian AU - Novotny, Petr AU - Rouillé, Owen ID - 24 TI - Expectation optimization with probabilistic guarantees in POMDPs with discounted-sum objectives VL - 2018 ER - TY - CONF AB - Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are widely used in probabilistic planning problems in which an agent interacts with an environment using noisy and imprecise sensors. We study a setting in which the sensors are only partially defined and the goal is to synthesize “weakest” additional sensors, such that in the resulting POMDP, there is a small-memory policy for the agent that almost-surely (with probability 1) satisfies a reachability objective. We show that the problem is NP-complete, and present a symbolic algorithm by encoding the problem into SAT instances. We illustrate trade-offs between the amount of memory of the policy and the number of additional sensors on a simple example. We have implemented our approach and consider three classical POMDP examples from the literature, and show that in all the examples the number of sensors can be significantly decreased (as compared to the existing solutions in the literature) without increasing the complexity of the policies. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Chemlík, Martin AU - Topcu, Ufuk ID - 34 TI - Sensor synthesis for POMDPs with reachability objectives VL - 2018 ER - TY - CONF AB - We consider planning problems for graphs, Markov decision processes (MDPs), and games on graphs. While graphs represent the most basic planning model, MDPs represent interaction with nature and games on graphs represent interaction with an adversarial environment. We consider two planning problems where there are k different target sets, and the problems are as follows: (a) the coverage problem asks whether there is a plan for each individual target set; and (b) the sequential target reachability problem asks whether the targets can be reached in sequence. For the coverage problem, we present a linear-time algorithm for graphs, and quadratic conditional lower bound for MDPs and games on graphs. For the sequential target problem, we present a linear-time algorithm for graphs, a sub-quadratic algorithm for MDPs, and a quadratic conditional lower bound for games on graphs. Our results with conditional lower bounds establish (i) model-separation results showing that for the coverage problem MDPs and games on graphs are harder than graphs and for the sequential reachability problem games on graphs are harder than MDPs and graphs; and (ii) objective-separation results showing that for MDPs the coverage problem is harder than the sequential target problem. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Dvorák, Wolfgang AU - Henzinger, Monika H AU - Svozil, Alexander ID - 35 T2 - 28th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling TI - Algorithms and conditional lower bounds for planning problems ER - TY - JOUR AB - This paper is devoted to automatic competitive analysis of real-time scheduling algorithms for firm-deadline tasksets, where only completed tasks con- tribute some utility to the system. Given such a taskset T , the competitive ratio of an on-line scheduling algorithm A for T is the worst-case utility ratio of A over the utility achieved by a clairvoyant algorithm. We leverage the theory of quantitative graph games to address the competitive analysis and competitive synthesis problems. For the competitive analysis case, given any taskset T and any finite-memory on- line scheduling algorithm A , we show that the competitive ratio of A in T can be computed in polynomial time in the size of the state space of A . Our approach is flexible as it also provides ways to model meaningful constraints on the released task sequences that determine the competitive ratio. We provide an experimental study of many well-known on-line scheduling algorithms, which demonstrates the feasibility of our competitive analysis approach that effectively replaces human ingenuity (required Preliminary versions of this paper have appeared in Chatterjee et al. ( 2013 , 2014 ). B Andreas Pavlogiannis pavlogiannis@ist.ac.at Krishnendu Chatterjee krish.chat@ist.ac.at Alexander Kößler koe@ecs.tuwien.ac.at Ulrich Schmid s@ecs.tuwien.ac.at 1 IST Austria (Institute of Science and Technology Austria), Am Campus 1, 3400 Klosterneuburg, Austria 2 Embedded Computing Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology, Treitlstrasse 3, 1040 Vienna, Austria 123 Real-Time Syst for finding worst-case scenarios) by computing power. For the competitive synthesis case, we are just given a taskset T , and the goal is to automatically synthesize an opti- mal on-line scheduling algorithm A , i.e., one that guarantees the largest competitive ratio possible for T . We show how the competitive synthesis problem can be reduced to a two-player graph game with partial information, and establish that the compu- tational complexity of solving this game is Np -complete. The competitive synthesis problem is hence in Np in the size of the state space of the non-deterministic labeled transition system encoding the taskset. Overall, the proposed framework assists in the selection of suitable scheduling algorithms for a given taskset, which is in fact the most common situation in real-time systems design. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Pavlogiannis, Andreas AU - Kößler, Alexander AU - Schmid, Ulrich ID - 738 IS - 1 JF - Real-Time Systems TI - Automated competitive analysis of real time scheduling with graph games VL - 54 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We consider a class of students learning a language from a teacher. The situation can be interpreted as a group of child learners receiving input from the linguistic environment. The teacher provides sample sentences. The students try to learn the grammar from the teacher. In addition to just listening to the teacher, the students can also communicate with each other. The students hold hypotheses about the grammar and change them if they receive counter evidence. The process stops when all students have converged to the correct grammar. We study how the time to convergence depends on the structure of the classroom by introducing and evaluating various complexity measures. We find that structured communication between students, although potentially introducing confusion, can greatly reduce some of the complexity measures. Our theory can also be interpreted as applying to the scientific process, where nature is the teacher and the scientists are the students. AU - Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus AU - Tkadlec, Josef AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Nowak, Martin ID - 198 IS - 140 JF - Journal of the Royal Society Interface TI - Language acquisition with communication between learners VL - 15 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Because of the intrinsic randomness of the evolutionary process, a mutant with a fitness advantage has some chance to be selected but no certainty. Any experiment that searches for advantageous mutants will lose many of them due to random drift. It is therefore of great interest to find population structures that improve the odds of advantageous mutants. Such structures are called amplifiers of natural selection: they increase the probability that advantageous mutants are selected. Arbitrarily strong amplifiers guarantee the selection of advantageous mutants, even for very small fitness advantage. Despite intensive research over the past decade, arbitrarily strong amplifiers have remained rare. Here we show how to construct a large variety of them. Our amplifiers are so simple that they could be useful in biotechnology, when optimizing biological molecules, or as a diagnostic tool, when searching for faster dividing cells or viruses. They could also occur in natural population structures. AU - Pavlogiannis, Andreas AU - Tkadlec, Josef AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Nowak, Martin A. ID - 5751 IS - 1 JF - Communications Biology SN - 2399-3642 TI - Construction of arbitrarily strong amplifiers of natural selection using evolutionary graph theory VL - 1 ER - TY - CONF AB - Crypto-currencies are digital assets designed to work as a medium of exchange, e.g., Bitcoin, but they are susceptible to attacks (dishonest behavior of participants). A framework for the analysis of attacks in crypto-currencies requires (a) modeling of game-theoretic aspects to analyze incentives for deviation from honest behavior; (b) concurrent interactions between participants; and (c) analysis of long-term monetary gains. Traditional game-theoretic approaches for the analysis of security protocols consider either qualitative temporal properties such as safety and termination, or the very special class of one-shot (stateless) games. However, to analyze general attacks on protocols for crypto-currencies, both stateful analysis and quantitative objectives are necessary. In this work our main contributions are as follows: (a) we show how a class of concurrent mean-payo games, namely ergodic games, can model various attacks that arise naturally in crypto-currencies; (b) we present the first practical implementation of algorithms for ergodic games that scales to model realistic problems for crypto-currencies; and (c) we present experimental results showing that our framework can handle games with thousands of states and millions of transitions. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Goharshady, Amir AU - Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus AU - Velner, Yaron ID - 66 SN - 978-3-95977-087-3 TI - Ergodic mean-payoff games for the analysis of attacks in crypto-currencies VL - 118 ER - TY - CONF AB - Smart contracts are computer programs that are executed by a network of mutually distrusting agents, without the need of an external trusted authority. Smart contracts handle and transfer assets of considerable value (in the form of crypto-currency like Bitcoin). Hence, it is crucial that their implementation is bug-free. We identify the utility (or expected payoff) of interacting with such smart contracts as the basic and canonical quantitative property for such contracts. We present a framework for such quantitative analysis of smart contracts. Such a formal framework poses new and novel research challenges in programming languages, as it requires modeling of game-theoretic aspects to analyze incentives for deviation from honest behavior and modeling utilities which are not specified as standard temporal properties such as safety and termination. While game-theoretic incentives have been analyzed in the security community, their analysis has been restricted to the very special case of stateless games. However, to analyze smart contracts, stateful analysis is required as it must account for the different program states of the protocol. Our main contributions are as follows: we present (i)~a simplified programming language for smart contracts; (ii)~an automatic translation of the programs to state-based games; (iii)~an abstraction-refinement approach to solve such games; and (iv)~experimental results on real-world-inspired smart contracts. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Goharshady, Amir AU - Velner, Yaron ID - 311 TI - Quantitative analysis of smart contracts VL - 10801 ER - TY - CONF AB - We present a secure approach for maintaining andreporting credit history records on the Blockchain. Our ap-proach removes third-parties such as credit reporting agen-cies from the lending process and replaces them with smartcontracts. This allows customers to interact directly with thelenders or banks while ensuring the integrity, unmalleabilityand privacy of their credit data. Additionally, each customerhas full control over complete or selective disclosure of hercredit records, eliminating the risk of privacy violations or databreaches. Moreover, our approach provides strong guaranteesfor the lenders as well. A lender can check both correctness andcompleteness of the credit data disclosed to her. This is the firstapproach that can perform all credit reporting tasks withouta central authority or changing the financial mechanisms*. AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar AU - Behrouz, Ali AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu ID - 6340 SN - 978-1-5386-7975-3 T2 - Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Blockchain TI - Secure Credit Reporting on the Blockchain ER - TY - JOUR AB - We study algorithmic questions wrt algebraic path properties in concurrent systems, where the transitions of the system are labeled from a complete, closed semiring. The algebraic path properties can model dataflow analysis problems, the shortest path problem, and many other natural problems that arise in program analysis. We consider that each component of the concurrent system is a graph with constant treewidth, a property satisfied by the controlflow graphs of most programs. We allow for multiple possible queries, which arise naturally in demand driven dataflow analysis. The study of multiple queries allows us to consider the tradeoff between the resource usage of the one-time preprocessing and for each individual query. The traditional approach constructs the product graph of all components and applies the best-known graph algorithm on the product. In this approach, even the answer to a single query requires the transitive closure (i.e., the results of all possible queries), which provides no room for tradeoff between preprocessing and query time. Our main contributions are algorithms that significantly improve the worst-case running time of the traditional approach, and provide various tradeoffs depending on the number of queries. For example, in a concurrent system of two components, the traditional approach requires hexic time in the worst case for answering one query as well as computing the transitive closure, whereas we show that with one-time preprocessing in almost cubic time, each subsequent query can be answered in at most linear time, and even the transitive closure can be computed in almost quartic time. Furthermore, we establish conditional optimality results showing that the worst-case running time of our algorithms cannot be improved without achieving major breakthroughs in graph algorithms (i.e., improving the worst-case bound for the shortest path problem in general graphs). Preliminary experimental results show that our algorithms perform favorably on several benchmarks. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus AU - Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar AU - Pavlogiannis, Andreas ID - 6009 IS - 3 JF - ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems SN - 0164-0925 TI - Algorithms for algebraic path properties in concurrent systems of constant treewidth components VL - 40 ER - TY - CONF AB - We consider the stochastic shortest path (SSP)problem for succinct Markov decision processes(MDPs), where the MDP consists of a set of vari-ables, and a set of nondeterministic rules that up-date the variables. First, we show that several ex-amples from the AI literature can be modeled assuccinct MDPs. Then we present computationalapproaches for upper and lower bounds for theSSP problem: (a) for computing upper bounds, ourmethod is polynomial-time in the implicit descrip-tion of the MDP; (b) for lower bounds, we present apolynomial-time (in the size of the implicit descrip-tion) reduction to quadratic programming. Our ap-proach is applicable even to infinite-state MDPs.Finally, we present experimental results to demon-strate the effectiveness of our approach on severalclassical examples from the AI literature. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Fu, Hongfei AU - Goharshady, Amir AU - Okati, Nastaran ID - 5977 SN - 10450823 T2 - Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence TI - Computational approaches for stochastic shortest path on succinct MDPs VL - 2018 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Indirect reciprocity explores how humans act when their reputation is at stake, and which social norms they use to assess the actions of others. A crucial question in indirect reciprocity is which social norms can maintain stable cooperation in a society. Past research has highlighted eight such norms, called “leading-eight” strategies. This past research, however, is based on the assumption that all relevant information about other population members is publicly available and that everyone agrees on who is good or bad. Instead, here we explore the reputation dynamics when information is private and noisy. We show that under these conditions, most leading-eight strategies fail to evolve. Those leading-eight strategies that do evolve are unable to sustain full cooperation.Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism for cooperation based on shared moral systems and individual reputations. It assumes that members of a community routinely observe and assess each other and that they use this information to decide who is good or bad, and who deserves cooperation. When information is transmitted publicly, such that all community members agree on each other’s reputation, previous research has highlighted eight crucial moral systems. These “leading-eight” strategies can maintain cooperation and resist invasion by defectors. However, in real populations individuals often hold their own private views of others. Once two individuals disagree about their opinion of some third party, they may also see its subsequent actions in a different light. Their opinions may further diverge over time. Herein, we explore indirect reciprocity when information transmission is private and noisy. We find that in the presence of perception errors, most leading-eight strategies cease to be stable. Even if a leading-eight strategy evolves, cooperation rates may drop considerably when errors are common. Our research highlights the role of reliable information and synchronized reputations to maintain stable moral systems. AU - Hilbe, Christian AU - Schmid, Laura AU - Tkadlec, Josef AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Nowak, Martin ID - 2 IS - 48 JF - PNAS TI - Indirect reciprocity with private, noisy, and incomplete information VL - 115 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We present a new proof rule for proving almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs, including those that contain demonic non-determinism. An important question for a probabilistic program is whether the probability mass of all its diverging runs is zero, that is that it terminates "almost surely". Proving that can be hard, and this paper presents a new method for doing so. It applies directly to the program's source code, even if the program contains demonic choice. Like others, we use variant functions (a.k.a. "super-martingales") that are real-valued and decrease randomly on each loop iteration; but our key innovation is that the amount as well as the probability of the decrease are parametric. We prove the soundness of the new rule, indicate where its applicability goes beyond existing rules, and explain its connection to classical results on denumerable (non-demonic) Markov chains. AU - Mciver, Annabelle AU - Morgan, Carroll AU - Kaminski, Benjamin Lucien AU - Katoen, Joost P ID - 10418 IS - POPL JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages TI - A new proof rule for almost-sure termination VL - 2 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The computation of the winning set for parity objectives and for Streett objectives in graphs as well as in game graphs are central problems in computer-aided verification, with application to the verification of closed systems with strong fairness conditions, the verification of open systems, checking interface compatibility, well-formedness of specifications, and the synthesis of reactive systems. We show how to compute the winning set on n vertices for (1) parity-3 (aka one-pair Streett) objectives in game graphs in time O(n5/2) and for (2) k-pair Streett objectives in graphs in time O(n2+nklogn). For both problems this gives faster algorithms for dense graphs and represents the first improvement in asymptotic running time in 15 years. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Henzinger, Monika H AU - Loitzenbauer, Veronika ID - 464 IS - 3 JF - Logical Methods in Computer Science SN - 1860-5974 TI - Improved algorithms for parity and Streett objectives VL - 13 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple limit-average (or mean-payoff) objectives. There exist two different views: (i) the expectation semantics, where the goal is to optimize the expected mean-payoff objective, and (ii) the satisfaction semantics, where the goal is to maximize the probability of runs such that the mean-payoff value stays above a given vector. We consider optimization with respect to both objectives at once, thus unifying the existing semantics. Precisely, the goal is to optimize the expectation while ensuring the satisfaction constraint. Our problem captures the notion of optimization with respect to strategies that are risk-averse (i.e., ensure certain probabilistic guarantee). Our main results are as follows: First, we present algorithms for the decision problems which are always polynomial in the size of the MDP. We also show that an approximation of the Pareto-curve can be computed in time polynomial in the size of the MDP, and the approximation factor, but exponential in the number of dimensions. Second, we present a complete characterization of the strategy complexity (in terms of memory bounds and randomization) required to solve our problem. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Křetínská, Zuzana AU - Kretinsky, Jan ID - 466 IS - 2 JF - Logical Methods in Computer Science SN - 18605974 TI - Unifying two views on multiple mean-payoff objectives in Markov decision processes VL - 13 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Recently there has been a significant effort to handle quantitative properties in formal verification and synthesis. While weighted automata over finite and infinite words provide a natural and flexible framework to express quantitative properties, perhaps surprisingly, some basic system properties such as average response time cannot be expressed using weighted automata or in any other known decidable formalism. In this work, we introduce nested weighted automata as a natural extension of weighted automata, which makes it possible to express important quantitative properties such as average response time. In nested weighted automata, a master automaton spins off and collects results from weighted slave automata, each of which computes a quantity along a finite portion of an infinite word. Nested weighted automata can be viewed as the quantitative analogue of monitor automata, which are used in runtime verification. We establish an almost-complete decidability picture for the basic decision problems about nested weighted automata and illustrate their applicability in several domains. In particular, nested weighted automata can be used to decide average response time properties. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Henzinger, Thomas A AU - Otop, Jan ID - 467 IS - 4 JF - ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL) SN - 15293785 TI - Nested weighted automata VL - 18 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The edit distance between two words w 1 , w 2 is the minimal number of word operations (letter insertions, deletions, and substitutions) necessary to transform w 1 to w 2 . The edit distance generalizes to languages L 1 , L 2 , where the edit distance from L 1 to L 2 is the minimal number k such that for every word from L 1 there exists a word in L 2 with edit distance at most k . We study the edit distance computation problem between pushdown automata and their subclasses. The problem of computing edit distance to a pushdown automaton is undecidable, and in practice, the interesting question is to compute the edit distance from a pushdown automaton (the implementation, a standard model for programs with recursion) to a regular language (the specification). In this work, we present a complete picture of decidability and complexity for the following problems: (1) deciding whether, for a given threshold k , the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is at most k , and (2) deciding whether the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is finite. AU - Chatterjee, Krishnendu AU - Henzinger, Thomas A AU - Ibsen-Jensen, Rasmus AU - Otop, Jan ID - 465 IS - 3 JF - Logical Methods in Computer Science SN - 18605974 TI - Edit distance for pushdown automata VL - 13 ER -